Notorious fuckboy John Mayer reckons he’s realised his privilege after watching the New York Times documentary Framing Britney Spears and uhh, this is a bit of a case of the pot calling the kettle black isn’t it?
“Obviously, there’s a lot to parse on a sociological level. I almost cried five times during that,” Mayer said while cohosting Andy Cohen Live.
“There’s a debate as to whether the times in and of themselves kind of encased this behaviour. Like, it’s hard to go back into the sap and cut into it because it is sort of suspended in amber, some of this stuff. But, to see the sadness in this human being … I was on the edge of tears five times because if you understand what this business/industry/lifestyle does to a person, to go through this and come out the other side OK is to have infinite grace for those who struggle with it.”
Throughout the Framing Britney Spears documentary, we were not-so-pleasantly reminded of all of the times Justin Timberlake absolutely ruined Britney’s life, and how misogyny and sexism in the industry chewed her up and spat her out.
And while it’s all well and good that John Mayer has taken the time to watch the doco and reflect on his privilege, it means precisely zero when he is yet to actually be held accountable for his own shitty behaviour.
Honestly, I think there are some pretty clear comparisons between Timberlake and Mayer’s lives.
Both singers are well-known womanisers, who have repeatedly profited off the narrative that their ex-girlfriends are crazy. They’ve both been misogynistic and sexist, and watched their careers skyrocket while giving precisely zero shits about the women who fell to their demise in the process.
So let’s just take a look at some of the things Mayer needs to apologise for if he really wants us to take his recognition of privilege seriously, shall we?
Likening Jessica Simpson To Cocaine:
For starters, we need to talk about the weird Playboy interview he gave about Jessica Simpson, in which he likened her to cocaine and said he wanted to “just fucking snort” her.
“That girl is like crack cocaine to me,” Mayer said of Simpson. “Sexually it was crazy. That’s all I’ll say. It was like napalm, sexual napalm. Did you ever say, ‘I want to quit my life and just fucking snort you? If you charged me $10,000 to f–k you, I would start selling all my shit just to keep fucking you.’”
Thankfully (for Jessica), this interview gave her the closure she needed from the relationship, asserting that she was “floored and embarrassed that my grandmother was actually gonna read that.”
Calling His Dick A “White Supremacist”:
During the same (trainwreck) Playboy interview, Mayer asserted that “Black people love [him]” while being incredibly racist, dropping the n-word and uhh… calling his dick a “white supremacist.”
“Someone asked me the other day, ‘What does it feel like now to have a hood pass?” Mayer said. “And by the way, it’s sort of a contradiction in terms, because if you really had a hood pass, you could call it a [redacted] pass. Why are you pulling a punch and calling it a hood pass if you really have a hood pass? But I said, ‘I can’t have a hood pass. I’ve never walked into a restaurant, asked for a table and been told, ‘We’re full.’”
“My dick is sort of like a white supremacist,” Mayer continued. “I’ve got a Benetton heart and a fuckin David Duke cock. I’m going to start dating separately from my dick.”
Wanting The Joshua Tree Of Vaginas:
Honestly, I don’t know how John Mayer has gone this long in his career talking about nothing but his weird sex stuff in interviews but in 2012 he gave another trainwreck interview in which he discussed dating, jerking off and his standards on vaginas. It was weird and gross to say the least.
“All I want to do now is fuck the girls I’ve already fucked, because I can’t fathom explaining myself to somebody who can’t believe I’d be interested in them, and they’re going, ‘But you’re John Mayer!’ So I’m going backwards to move forward. I’m too freaked out to meet anybody else,” he told Rolling Stone in 2012 when asked about struggling to find a girlfriend.
But he then went on to explain that he has a hard-and-fast rule about only dating women who have a “vagina you could pitch a tent on.”
“Do you think it’s going to take meeting someone who I admire more than I admire myself? But isn’t it also about a beautiful vagina? Aren’t we talking about a matrix of a couple of different things here? Like, you need to have them be able to go toe-to-toe with you intellectually. But don’t they also have to have a vagina you could pitch a tent on and just camp out on for, like, a weekend? Doesn’t that have to be there, too? The Joshua Tree of vaginas?”
Not Wanting To Be A Feminist:
More recently, in 2018, Mayer discussed his views on feminism on Instagram.
Unsurprisingly, he gave the typical “not a feminist but supports equal rights for women” answer which is basically code for “I have not spent half a second researching what feminism actually is.
“My take is less about feminism and more about the issue of nomenclature, specifically how reductiveness of language can turn people off from noble and vital causes. If you asked people if they support ensuring equal rights for women in all aspects of their lives, they would very likely answer yes. Change that question to ‘are you a feminist’ and the answers instantly become more complicated. That’s because a single phrase is being co-opted than the actual ideal it attempts to present,” he wrote on Instagram.
Now usually, I’d let this slide as ignorance and stupidity but considering Mayer’s sexist and misogynistic past, I think this is just a sign that he’s straight-up not a feminist.
Jessica Simpson Alleging That He Was (At Least) Low-Key Abusive:
Jessica Simpson and Mayer dated for about a year in 2006/07. Years later, Jessica discussed the emotional turmoil she experienced during the relationship, which appears to be gaslighting and emotional manipulation.
“He would tell me that my true self is so much greater than the person I was settling on being,” Simpson wrote in her book Open Book. “Like there was some great woman inside me waiting to come out, and I had to hurry up and find her because he wanted to love that woman, not me.”
“I constantly worried that I wasn’t smart enough for him,” she continued. “I was so afraid of disappointing him that I couldn’t even text him without having someone check my grammar and spelling.”
She also added that her relationship with Mayer was the catalyst for her alcohol abuse issues.
“My anxiety would spike and I would pour another drink,” she added, according to People. “It was the start of me relying on alcohol to mask my nerves.”
The Way He Treated Taylor Swift:
The whole narrative of “be careful, she’ll write a song about you” surrounding Taylor Swift and the crazy ex-girlfriend persona she’s had to fight hard to overcome is almost entirely the work of Mayer.
The pair dated when she was 19 and he was 32. Although that’s a totally legal age gap, the relationship was widely believed to have begun by him being a mentor for her in her music career, which is a pretty clear power imbalance.
But I’m not going to speculate anything predatory on account of the fact that Taylor hasn’t actually alleged anything of the sort.
However, it is worth noting that John really dictated the conversation around the relationship after the release of Dear John, pushing the narrative that poor little John Mayer was the victim in the whole ordeal.
Swift wasn’t allowed to give us Dear John, but Mayer was apparently well within his rights to drop Paper Doll? I think the fuck not.
Stream Dear John, babes.
Dumping Jen Aniston Because She Was Too Old:
Mayer dumped Friends star Jennifer Aniston because she was too old for him, (eight years his senior), but had precisely zero issues dating a 19-year-old Taylor Swift at the ripe old age of 32.
But not only did he dump her for being too old, he *really* rubbed salt in the wound as he did it.
“I’ll always be sorry that it didn’t last,” Mayer said at the time. “In some ways I wish I could be with her. But I can’t change the fact that I need to be 32.”
“If Jennifer Aniston knows how to use BitTorrent, I’ll eat my fucking shoe.”
“One of the most significant differences between us was that I was tweeting. There was a rumour that I had been dumped because I was tweeting too much. That wasn’t it, but that was a big difference.”
John, my dude, Jennifer Aniston is so far out of your league it’s not even funny. Eat your shoe and shut up.
John Mayer has a laundry list of people and things to apologise for before I will ever take his opinions on the #FreeBritney movement seriously. But I’m sure it’ll take another decade before we ever get the apology we deserve, so in the meantime, you can find out how to watch Framing Britney Spears in Australia here.
